News Coverage Race for the Great Earthquake

My previous article on advertising can be found here:

http://chinese-net-gaming-stock.blogspot.com/2008/03/statistics-from-dcci-on-chinas-online.html

There is a magnitude 8.7 earthquake in China on 5/12/2008. It occurs on 2:28pm China time.

May I offer my utmost sadness to the people in China and best wish to you all. But I want to use this opportunity to check out the portals’ performance and how they can react to fast moving news.

All four major portals have dedicated section on this disaster. They are listed below:

Tencent: http://news.qq.com/zt/2008/dizhen/

Netease: http://news.163.com/special/00012MS5/sichuan0512.html

Sohu: http://news.sohu.com/s2008/dizhen/

Sina: http://news.sina.com.cn/z/08earthquake/index.shtml

It is now 3:13pm China time on 5/13/2008. It is exactly one day after the quake occurs (give or take 30 minutes). I did a quick count on the number of articles and number of video clips on each portal. The result is listed in the following table:

	NTES	Tencent	SOHU	SINA
# of articles	340	372	760	850
# of video clips	15	108	108	61

From the above table, Sina has the most amounts of articles. Sohu is not far behind. Sohu and Tencents both have large amounts of video clips. In terms of numbers of articles, Sina and Sohu have more than twice as many news articles than NTES and Tencent. NTES is behind in securing video reporting. I am a little surprised that SINA’s video clips are only half of that of SOHU and Tencent.

Overall, I would say SOHU comes out on top, SINA comes in number two, Tencent comes in a strong number 3 while NTES is little disappointing.

SINA has the reputation as being the king of content in China. SOHU’s content department is really catching up fast.

Another point that can be observed from this study is that competition in China’s portals is fierce. I don’t think CNN or MSNBC or Yahoo would have this much information in such little time. Granted most (if not all) of the articles and video clips are sourced from third parties, but the amount of information is still tremendous.

Finally, it will be impossible for any TV stations in China to compete with China’s internet portals for the amount of information available.

This definitely points out the inevitable trend from TV, radio, or print to the internet.